 | Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies To Build Breakthrough Brands By Douglas Holt, Douglas Cameron
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Product Description
Market innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists--build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. The most influential strategy books--such as Competing for the Future, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Blue Ocean Strategy--argue that innovation should focus on breakthrough functionality.
Holt and Cameron challenge this conventional wisdom. They develop a cultural approach to innovation: champion a better ideology and the world will take notice. The authors use detailed historical analyses of the take-offs of Nike, vitaminwater, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniel's, Levi's, ESPN, and Ben & Jerry's to build a powerful new theory. They show how brands in mature categories come to rely upon similar conventional brand expressions, leading to what the authors call a cultural orthodoxy. Historical changes in society threaten this orthodoxy by creating demand for new culture. Cultural innovations draw upon source material--novel cultural content lurking in subcultures, social movements, and the media--to develop brands that respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents. The authors demonstrate how they have adapted this theory into a step-by-step cultural strategy model, which they successfully applied to start-ups (Fat Tire beer), consumer technologies (Clearblue pregnancy tests), under-funded challengers (Fuse Music Television), and social enterprises (Freelancers Union). Holt and Cameron conclude by explaining why top marketing companies fail at cultural innovation. Using careful organizational research, the authors demonstrate that companies are trapped in the brand bureaucracy, which systematically derails innovation. Cultural innovation requires a new organizational logic. In all of their cases, the authors find that the cultural innovators have rejected the brand bureaucracy.
Written by one of the leading authorities on brands and marketing in the world today, Cultural Strategy transforms what has always been treated as the "intuitive" side of branding into a systematic strategic discipline.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #256391 in Books
- Published on: 2010-12-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.00" h x 6.45" w x 9.47" l, 1.62 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 408 pages
Review
"May well be one of the most important books on advertising and branding in the past ten years."--Adliterate.com
About the Author
Douglas Holt is the L'Or�al Professor of Marketing at the Unversity of Oxford, and Co-Principal of The Cultural Strategy Group. Previously he was a professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School. He is a leading expert on brand strategy, having established cultural branding as an important new strategy tool in his best-selling book How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. He has developed cultural strategies for a wide range of brands, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry's, Sprite, Jack Daniel's, MINI, MasterCard, Fat Tire beer, Qdoba, Georgia Coffee, Planet Green, and Mike's Hard Lemonade, along with a number of non-profit organizations. He holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, and is the editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He has been invited to give talks at universities and management seminars worldwide, including the Global Economic Forum in Davos. He lives in Salida, Colorado.
Douglas Cameron is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Amalgamated, an influential non-traditional advertising agency known for developing provocative cultural content across multiple media platforms. He began his career at Cliff Freeman & Partners, the most lauded creative shop of its time. He entered the world of marketing inadvertently: travelling the world as a bagpiper, he was invited by David Ogilvy to perform at his French castle. Ogilvy insisted he take up advertising. He worked with Holt extensively developing cultural strategies at Cliff Freeman and Amalgamated, which led to his role as co-author of Cultural Strategy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he received the English departments top graduating honor.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.Refreshingly Irreverant
By C. Sullivan
Liked this book very much. The irreverence and polemic were refreshing. Holt and Cameron practice what they preach, and don't pull punches. The ideas and thinking are solid. The cases are excellent. After reading I recommended to friends at ad agencies, many of whom no doubt face H & C's `brand bureaucracy'.
Style-wise, `Cultural Strategy' found a nice niche between scholarship and practice. I liked this approach. But if you prefer 1-2-3 books on brand and strategy, don't buy the book. You're going to get Max Weber and terms like `mimetic isomorphism' just as much you get stories on brands like Nike, Levi's, Vitamin Water and Fat Tire. I liked the combination, others might not.
As someone in strategy, I do have some beef with Holt and Cameron's stance against utility, or what they refer to as `mousetrap' thinking. They take the constructivist line of thinking too far, and it diminishes their argument. They need a foil, but of all their polemics this one feels more rhetorical than substantive. Ideally, value creation and cultural innovation work together. If subjectivity were all that mattered we wouldn't be in this recession. H & C have written particular kinds of cases-- products fighting it out in mature markets with homogeneous offerings. In these situations i think they're argument holds up better. In emerging markets where the there is still a great deal of diversity in offerings, i'm not as sure. The one outlier here is the freelancer's union case, which was quite good.
But on all other accounts, this book furthered my thinking. Even if you don't agree with the authors, they'll engage you. I'd read it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.Essential reading for academics, entrepreneurs, and F500 managers
By William Ko
This outstanding work underscores the importance of incorporating culture into marketing initiatives to drive sales growth and market share. Citing Weber's theory of bureaucratization in Economics and Society, Holt argues convincingly that leading firms have sacrificed marketing innovation for ineffective brand management based on standardization, superfluous scientific methodology, and dehumanization of the consumer products/services and the markets that they ultimately serve. Controversially, but supported with strong empircal examples, Holt asserts that the epistemic proclivities of establishing marketing as a 'faux science' has resulted in stagnant 'mousetrap' strategies that result in minimal gains in growth.
Supported by case-studies of both successful and unsuccessful marketing initiatives, Cultural Strategy is essential reading for academics, entrepreneurs and F500 management seeking iconoclastic reconceptualizations of the consumer goods landscape.
I suspect, however, that the prevailing path dependencies and perceptions of 'brand strategy' among leading firms in industry today will inhibit Holt's central thesis from attaining wide-scale practice. But perhaps as a greater number of agile entrepreneurs leverage 'cultural strategy' to win a greater share of blue ocean opportunities, the aforementioned market-leading firms will be compelled to take notice.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.Excellent marketing study
By Michael Selander
This book is an eye opener on the true cultural effects of good marketing campaigns. The book effectively and engagingly touches on the most important topics and features of a true cultural strategy. I would recommend this book for anyone in the marketing field.
http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/019958740X
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